On July 10th, 1914, armed Ulster Volunteers marched through Belfast, and Sir Edward Carson held the first meeting of his provisional government.
On July 26th, 1914, the British troops killed three persons and wounded thirty-two persons because rowdies had thrown stones at them in Dublin, subsequent to their futile attempt to intercept Irish Volunteer arms.
On Sept. 19th, 1914, the home rule bill was signed, but its operation indefinitely suspended.
In May, 1915, Sir Edward Carson became a member of the British Cabinet.
These events were endured by John Redmond. He had early accepted a Fabian policy and put his trust in Englishmen who shirked paying the price of maintaining the law they decreed. The more radical men in Dublin were not so trusting. They had heard Asquith promise that no permanent division of Ireland would be permitted, and they learned he had bargained for it. They had heard him promise he would vindicate the law, and they saw him sanction the defiant military leader as commander-in-chief and the defiant civil leader as a minister of the crown. With the vivid memory of British troops killing Irish citizens on the streets of Dublin, they drew their conclusions as to English honor. They had no impulse to recruit for the defense on the Continent of an Empire thus honorable. They looked back on the evil history they had been ready to forget. They prepared to strike and to die.
Irishmen like myself who believed in home rule and disbelieved in revolution did not agree with this spirit. We thought southern Ireland might persuade Ulster. We thought English authority was possibly weak and shifty, but benign. We did not wish to see Ireland, in the words of Professor MacNeill, go fornicating with Germany. When our brothers went to the European war we took England’s gratitude as heartfelt and her repentance as deep. Our history was one of forcible conquest, torture, rape, enforced subservience, ignorance, poverty, famine. But we listened to G. K. Chesterton about Englishmen in relation to magnanimous Ireland: “It was to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the hem of her garment.”
All the deeper, then, the shock we received from the execution of our men of finest mettle. They were guilty of rebellion in wartime, but so was De Wet in South Africa. There seems to have been a calculation based on the greater military strength of the Dutch. A government which had negotiated with rebels in the North, which had allowed the retention of arms in Ulster, which had put Carson in the Cabinet, could not mark an eternal bias in its judgment of brave men whose legitimate constitutional prospects it had raised high and then intolerably suspended. But this English government, often cringing and supine, was brave enough to slay one imprisoned rebel after another. It did so in the name of “justice,” the judges in this rebellion being officers of an army that had refused to stand against rebellion in Ulster.
It is not in vain, however, that these poets and Gaelic scholars and Republicans have stood blindfolded to be shot by English soldiers. Their verdict on English authority was scarcely in fault. They estimated with just contemptuousness the temper of a ruling class whose yoke Ireland has long been compelled to endure. Until that yoke is gone from Ireland, by the fulfillment of England’s bond, the memory of this rebellion must flourish. It testifies sadly but heroically that there are still Irishmen who cannot be sold over the counter, Irishmen who set no ultimate sanction on a dishonest authority, Irishmen who set no ultimate value on their merely mortal lives.
A LIMB OF THE LAW
“Look here,” said the policeman, tapping me on the chest, “Mrs. Trotsky used to live up here above on Simpson Avenue, in three rooms. And then see what happens—she turns up in Stockholm with two million roubles.”